One of my bigger Issue 200 projects, rather than using existing game art I decided to make a special 3D render of the Core 'Shroom Staff! Was this too big of an undertaking? Maybe. Here's the image I used Koopa-free, and the original render without any edits on it. The lighting isn't
great since I'm still getting the hang of this whole 3D thing but I think it works well enough for the fireworks setting, at least.
Thankfully, I didn't have to put all these guys together from scratch! Pitohui, WT, Anton, and LTQ were made by
@Paper Mario for an Awards presentation in 2022 and she very graciously allowed me to use them here. Rose, Meta, and the ever lovable Poochy were game rips from The Models Resource. Besides getting some textures to work properly, that narrowed it down to only five models I had to directly work on.
Funky was easy enough, she's just Kirby's model from
Kirby Star Allies with the texture hue-shifted purple. There's a seam on the mouth texture for some reason (I guess the mirroring is bad?) which got edited out in post.
Zange started out as a texture swap of Peach from
Mario Party Superstars with the hair and earrings removed. I was originally going to model Zange's hair from scratch, but because of time constraints I ended up using Daisy's hair from the same game with the texture changed to blue. It seemed like a close enough approximation.
FRANKENSTEINIAN BEAST. To dodge the issue of having to model a buff Yoshi, I combined Yoshi's head and hands from the
Super Mario Odyssey model with a texture edit of Giga Mac's body from
Super Smash Bros. Ultimate. I modeled the beard, though! It's still far from a perfect likeness of Yoshi876 and you may notice that the hands aren't even attached to the arms properly, so for the final image, I turned to the ancient technique of hiding things you don't want people to see behind other things. Because of the way the model is set up, I couldn't easily add the 876 to his chest. I was planning to paint them on the final image but it looked weird. The moral of the story, don't peek behind the curtain because you may find out everything was held together with duct tape and rubber bands.
The other Spotlight Manager in this image looks a lot better, at least! RHG is just a Quilava ripped from
Pokemon Scarlet & Violet with some extra accessories. The bandana was a modification from
Splatoon 2 and the glasses are a combination of a model from
Pokemon Let's Go Pikachu & Eevee and some original work.
Last but certainly not least, GBA! I started with Toad's model from
Super Mario 3D World, deleted the original body, and then added a bunch of extra parts plus some modifications to the Toad cap to have the screen. He was definitely the most work. I think the model served its purpose well for the image but it falls apart a little on closer examination (he's kind of square?) and the body isn't rigged so it's not really functional for poses more complex than this one.